I have a Perl script that reads a XML file that doesn't have content, only attributes in the element.
Like this:
<league>
<game name="bla"/>
</league>
Now I try to get the game attribute 'name'.
I tried using $xml->{league}->{game}->{name} and $xml->{league}->{game}->['name'] but they are both not working. Something about a hash problem.
Is there anybody who can help me get the value?
Well, from the XML you posted, I get this:
Entity: line 3: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: league line 0 and leage
It doesn't even appear to be a strict/warnings issue because it appears when I comment my USUW out.
But if you have the right tags, this should work:
$xml->{game}{name};
And if I call XMLin with KeepRoot => 1, you'll find it at:
$xml->{league}{game}{name};
If you are having trouble locating how the data is being read in, do this:
use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple;
my $xml = XMLin( $input );
say Data::Dumper->Dump( [ $xml ], [ '$xml' ] );
And then use the path to the structures presented.
Note:
$xml->{league}->{game}->['name'];
should have died with: "Not an ARRAY reference at" even without warnings enabled. ['string'] is a reference to an array with the string 'string' as the sole element. And, if $xml->{league}{game} were an array, it would have died with a non-numeric error, because strings don't address arrays.
Data::Dumper.['name'] then it's the same thing as: $array_ref->[0] = 'name', if you see square brackets, it's in an array--although I don't understand why it wouldn't have the attribute value ("blah" in the toy case) near by it.I normally instantiate my XML::Simple objects like this:
use XML::Simple ':strict';
my $xs = XML::Simple->new( KeepRoot => 1, KeyAttr => 1, ForceArray => 1 );
it allows the structure to be consistent between single and possibly multiple sub-elements. With those settings, this code gets your value:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple ':strict';
my $xs = XML::Simple->new( KeepRoot => 1, KeyAttr => 1, ForceArray => 1 );
my $ref = $xs->XMLin('data.xml');
print $ref->{league}[0]{game}[0]{name};
I added another game tag, and an attribute on the league tag as an example, this is the xml:
<league name="baz">
<game name="bla"/>
<game name="foo"/>
</league>
And the Data::Dumper output is:
$VAR1 = {
'league' => [
{
'game' => [
{
'name' => 'bla'
},
{
'name' => 'foo'
}
],
'name' => 'baz'
}
]
};
KeyAttr => 1 doesn't make much sense. Perhaps you mean KeyAttr => {}.